Burn Down The Night (2 page)

I smile.
Small-time dealing can make you feel so big-pocketed at times. I never go anywhere without
some­thing to bring something.

I wave a pillbox
at him. "I have a cure for your disease."

Inside the box a
sugar cube screams quietly with a whole lot more than sweetness going for it.

"It's yours if you
can swallow." I open the pillbox, show him the goodie inside.

"Let's go out in
the air. I want to catch the cure." He thrusts his hands in his jacket pockets and I nod. You
need running room to get up to speed before you leave the nest.

We start walking
out, a slow journey in super-slow motion through the debris of human party wreckage.

We pass a
dark-haired chick giving head, so out of it she would have given head to a Volkswagen. Bodies on
bodies like stacks of tongue depressors. Intense rap ses­sions of bodies beyond words.

Venice
beachhouse party. This summer you can get wet.
Wet between your legs. If you understand the thrill you don't have to seek it.

There is no
comprehension here.

"I'm having an
energy rush." Morrison speeds ahead, colliding with unresisting bodies in his flight. I stum­ble
after him, staggering in a vain attempt to keep up.

Morrison stops,
waits for me to catch up. He snatch­es a beer bottle from a chick with zits and a loud, raun­chy
chest that aims up at the sky like two ack-ack guns. He up-ends the bottle sloppily, spilling
some down the sides of his face.

Morrison massages
her shoulder a little, watching her breasts jump. Then he thrusts the beer bottle against her
chest, dead center between her bulging breasts.

Says something to
her about the great black bear of the woods and his beer bottle dildo.

Just catching up,
I don't quite hear it completely but she's laughing as I tumble past.

Morrison is
energized, in full maniacal flight. Coast­ing on the party energy, the
mad-orgy-mental-men­strual-cramp sensation.

A few people
already getting naked in an aimless animal way. Fleshly waves crashing on each other's shores.
Mindless animal couplings.

Someone screams,
drugs or pain, no one knows or asks.

A girl by the
door, hysterical expression and glazed eyes.

"Dachau missed a
few," says Morrison, going cryp­tic.

This girl at the
door has her T-shirt, a tie-dyed scream, half torn off and has blood on one side of her face and
clotted in the pale strands of her blond hair. She looks us both over as we get to the door and
sud­denly starts crying.

"Don't step on
her," I say. "She's probably some­body's mother."

"Daughters of
ministers! Religious snakes!" says Morrison, standing over her, passing some kind of benediction.
Half priest, half wired sumo wrestler.

We have to step
around her to get out. As we do, she goes into a fetal position, sitting up, arms wrapped fight
around her knees. My foot accidentally bumps her head and she overbalances, goes over on one side
and begins to throw up violently on the edge of the door frame.

"Party party
party!" Arms out like a human plane, Morrison jets out the doorway, exaltation on his face. Wild
shout, arms hugging the sky.
"Party!"

I tumble out the
doorway, jumping high to avoid the human fountain spraying vomit. I wobble, weaving be­hind him
with my load, melting eyes, screaming body. Face aching with the acid smile.

Just outside the
door Morrison turns and looks at me strangely. Theatrical whisper. "We'll go see the phallic
cannons of city hall! Erected by the city.
Erected!"

Just my acid smile
for a reply. Don't know what the fuck he's talking about and don't care. Got the feeling he's
peaking two times higher than I am and I am already knocking on the gates of heaven.

We march down the
driveway, out to the cars. Our meat-mind biker friend is out there, strutting his stuff for his
little blond beach bitch. He's banging some poor son of a bitch's head against the side of a blue
bus.

"That's him.
That's the one said those things about me," says his chick.

The meat slap of
head against metal is sickening. Blood comes in a stream from nose and mouth, the guy's already
knocked cold. He looks seriously dam­aged.

Morrison stops
abruptly, going up on his toes. I al­most collide with his back.

"Hey, man, stop!"
Morrison shouts.

Startled, the
biker lets his victim fall back against the fender of the bus, head rolling sideways like a
broken-necked doll.

"That's the wrong
one," says Morrison. "That's his brother. The other guy you wanted was taller and he was wearing
a blue condom with a hole in the tip. You can't miss him."

The biker gets up
off the body, stepping on the guy's chest.

His chick stands
next to him, arms going around him, hero worship. He's successfully defended her honor again,
probably the fourth or fifth time tonight.

Morrison and I
just stand there, staring at them. We are watching a movie about L.A. and its opened
veins.

The biker and his
bitch roar off into the night on a chrome-plated dragon with two wheels.

Killer on the
highway, legs wrapped around a hot en­gine made out of angry metal.

"I almost didn't
kill anybody back there," I say, sweating.

I don't know
exactly what I mean. Morrison seems stunned. He gets excited, feverish. There is a strange light
in his eyes. He says, "The dead delight in the par­ticipation of decay."

I get it. "But we
still live and the living delight in the escape of souls through hands of light, through faces in
the dark."

"You're a fucking
poet." He makes a wild gesture with his arms, embracing the world.

I shrug. "I only
bleed from my mouth menstrually is all. Every twenty-eight days my teeth get a little
irrita­ble."

Morrison nods.
"Bleed me a song and we'll find a dead dog to sing it."

We keep walking. I
stare into the warm night, watching the air dissemble around our heads. "Where do you want it?" I
ask, meaning the acid, as if where was as important as when.

"Someplace where
it would be good to die, not here. Too many asshole imitators already halfway there." Morrison
spins and looks at me, eyes burning. "Let's go for a ride up L.A.'s anus! We'll find a driver to
deliv­er graveyards! Epic journey!"

"Journey?" I
spread my fingers open, sweeping them across the horizon, pointing every which way. "Night
journeys are my favorite kind. I am a vacilandor!"

Morrison looks at
me, puzzled. "What's that?"

"A vacilandor is
someone who sets out on a quest to find something he knows is not there."

"I want to find a
girl who gives birth to her heart," says Morrison. "Let's go, menstruation mouth. Let's take a
trip."

Together, we had
begun a journey to the end of the night.

We walk down to
the beach, down to the conquis­tador shore. The night is a fever breathing around our heads. Wind
comes off the beach like a salty kiss that burns against the base of the spine.

Morrison keeps his
head turned a little, whatever else he does, so that the sounds of the sea are always clear in
his ears, as though he expects some other sound than the splashing of the waves, night
crashing.

My summer night
breathes in and out, me traveling where the sky gets heavy and reality doesn't.

"This isn't real,"
says Morrison, and his eyes sweep the darkened sea before us. "There is no other night like this
anyplace on earth.".

I am on my own
planet but I feel I can easily surren­der to his. I try it.

I hear the faint
thunder of breakers and my drug eyes see strange ghostly shapes, tattered galleons chasing
phantoms, death ships wheeling darkly through strange eerie islands. It's Morrison's world, some
un­seen place across the dark sea.

"Something is
happening out there." Morrison turns and looks at me. His voice sounds like a funeral. "I am an
island creature. I... am... drowning. Drowning in an ocean that touches strange shores.
Tonight... I will be ready... Tonight something strange is going to happen."

"You're freaking
me out," I say, eyes darting around, feeling paranoid rushes. Strange scuttling shapes form just
outside the lines of my vision.

I got too many
demons of my own making without sharing his.

Morrison moves an
arm, whipping it quickly across the sky as if he held a rapier.
"Ancestral Memories!
Witch
kiss. The sea calls us!"

Standing beside
him, I shiver. The dark is very dark. "I'll never be buried at sea." Morrison stares out there
somewhere, brooding. "My father died at sea. They scattered his ashes in all the oceans he
sailed. But I'll never end up like that."

Morrison looks up
at the sky. "Someday I'm going to explode into space."

"How did he die?"
An inane question.

Morrison shrugs.
"His heart failed. All death is heart failure."

Morrison moves
away, goes down to the water's edge.

"Something is
moving out there. Do you hear it?"

My mind flashes
outward, frightened, imagining, beholding dark transgressors. It seems that we stand on the edge
of an island surrounded by swirling waters. The fog comes down smothering and silent. The moon is
still high, for a silvery radiance filters magically through the mist, and beneath us washes the
sea, dark and filigreed with white foam.

I hear a moving in
the wind. The sound of wind in the rigging of a ghost ship, speaking to us in a voice none but a
shaman could understand.

The waves break at
Morrisop's feet. "The sea con­spires against us."

I move back,
threatened. Frightened.

"The admiral
sleeps with the sea. You can hear him crying on the conquistador shore." Morrison's cold laugh.
Sad and empty. "None of his children ever sail anymore."

"Look!"
Morrison points
into the dark above the sea. "The bone ship!"

My mind follows
his voice into the fantasy, into a strange terrifying world of his own making. I hear the timbers
creak, hear the voices of men who sail her, who sail some great and terrible galleon.

Slowly, so slowly,
like a dream you cannot wake from, a great shape, shadowy in that unearthly light, sweeps toward
us.

Out of the fog the
ghost ship looms, driving toward the island, its burning decks awash with blood. The mast towers
above us. I sense the presence of death.

Realization,
volition come back to me. In my terror I scream and turn away from the dream, from the shape
stalking the night, and stare at Morrison, the conjurer.

He's turned to
face me, eyes terrible in the moon­light.

"Before we sink in
too deep." Morrison uses his hands to feel the outlines of his face, to touch the skin. He shakes
his head as if to clear it of vision.

A scream still
vibrates inside my head, echoing.

I am lost, drug
gone. Paranoid, shaking. I reach for his shoulder, meaning by a touch to choke off the drug
music, the painful sound of his words that do not seem to belong to his body.

I want to join his
words and his body into something less terrifying. I hear someone talking.

His shoulder
passes through my fingers like the breeze. My eyes clear and I realize that he is several yards
away, picking up something from the ghost-white beach.

Morrison puts the
object in his pocket and comes back; "You've been talking to yourself," he says. "You must really
be destroyed."

It strikes me as
funny and I settle down a little. My big monster rush subsides. My face thinks it's smiling.
Control comes back. The world rights itself, night creatures melting into the mist from where
they have come.

"Yeah, guess I am
destroyed. You wanna join my wrecking crew?"

Morrison laughs.
"Only if I get to blow up the build­ings. Let's go. I want to walk a ways."

Morrison leads. I
follow, passing him the pillbox that seems to hum with the energy of its cargo.

I think I see
sparks fly from Morrison's hands as he touches the pillbox.

We walk up a short
walkway that dead-ends on a path running along the ocean. The buildings are full of lights and
moving bodies.

As we pass the
beachfront houses I feel them lean in­ward on me, like a silent row of parasites feeling the body
of its host.

Strange figures
like our own walk up and down the path, swimming into our visions, churning the sand in aimless
patterns.

A girl runs off
the beach screaming. Chased by no one we can see. Over and over again she screams,
"No! No!
No! No! No! Nooooooo!"

"This is a strange
dance," says Morrison. He swal­lows the sugar cube whole, to let it dissolve inside, a rectangle
of perception.